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Your Body
Why your recorded voice sounds wrong
You play back your own voice note. Wait. Who is that? Bad news: that is the voice everyone else hears.
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The aha, in writing
- Your voice reaches your ears through the air, the same road it takes to everyone else’s.
- It also travels through the bones of your skull straight to your inner ear, a road only you get.
- A microphone picks up only the air road, and for most speech sounds, between 1 and 2 kHz, the bone road made up most of what you hear of your own voice.
Reinfeldt, Östli, Håkansson, Stenfelt. Hearing one’s own voice during phoneme vocalization: transmission by air and bone conduction. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2010.


